What’s on *YOUR* workbench?

With the arrival of Mouser box-o'-bits on Saturday, the build festival is back on! Two new pedals are ABC (All But Cased). With the weekend's progress, I am down to 22 unbuilt boards, and 10 away from ordering something new!

Briefly on the bench for finishing up and testing: a Seabed Delay (Deep Blue Delay) first delay and first time with the PT2399. In my recent (and first) LCSC order, I have purchased some HG Semi PT2399. I am curious if anyone has any experience with this brand? Once I have a moment to play around, I do intend to compare the PT and HG Semi versions. I think that this is going to be a fun device to stick in the chain. I definitely feel this will fit on some of my synth music.
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Also through the bench tonight, the Circulator (EQD Grand Orbiter). Once I noticed the last missing capacitor, it works a beauty. Definitely more range of action than my first phaser, the Small Stone clone. Another pedal that is going to see play in synth work.

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More progress today. The unbuilt count is down another PCB to 21. The unhoused count is 6? although I have a couple of final (i.e. full print) cases in transit. January is going to be design and print month, I predict. (BTW - anyone else have a DHL shipment that is suddenly ON HOLD? Mine was supposed to be delivered today, but was on hold in Cincinnati this AM. Snow storm, maybe?

The @Aleph Null Moka Pot Fuzz lives and breathes! Which is cool and a different flavor of distortion to me. Outside of the case, and hooked up this way, the PCB is acting like a radio receiver with the highs turned up. I also think I am going to go back in and up the gain a bit.

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So now the bench is occupied with Fuzz Debate #3, the Twin Face PPCB. I have taken advantage of the HA Fuzz Explorer, and worked a bit to make this more versatile—I will post in a build report when I am done (human-selected em-dash, so there). I have slightly hotter (for me) GT309 Sovtek transistors and so the Ge side is biased in fairly standard way, but I tweaked the tone. For the PNP-side, I leveraged the Chthonic Fuzz circuit without the tone section to get something thats a bit different. Both sides look max-out "well behaved" fuzz around 9 and go into marginal oscillation and psychosis with the Fuzz at max, which is what I wanted.

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Breadboarding Moritz Klein's 808 snare (more info here) with a view to a permanent installation on a pair of Robert's marvellous breadboards.

Did you know that two of these fit perfectly in a 1590BB? Here's proof.

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I suspect that the BB may be too shallow to make this work but careful measurement of clearances will confirm this in due course. There may be enough space on the second breadboard to install the PSU. Time will tell, as it always does.
 
Putting together a Tone Reaper using some oddball parts that were left over or didn't work out in other builds. If you have any of those high gain, super high leakage NPN germanium transistors, then this is the build for you. The germanium transistor is a Tesla GC521 with 1.2mA leakage, which is typically way too much leakage, but it sounds perfect in this circuit.
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And a Fuzz Debate (twin face) is done. Cased and ready to go. I think this one fits the idea better than the first couple - less high end on the Ge, more crackle on the Si. Build report later, but unbuilt is down to 20.

But pause on that - who runs out of 10K resistors? I do. Missed that in last weeks Mouser order - on the way from DigiKey. The lack of key bits should help me focus on other things until the weekend.

Tayda box to pick up tomorrow! Couple of cases to check my print mods, a couple of new (to me) colors to see if I like. And a couple of mistake-click 1590B's. I gotta figure out what to do with those.
 

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PedalBuilder said:
Putting together a Tone Reaper using some oddball parts that were left over or didn't work out in other builds. If you have any of those high gain, super high leakage NPN germanium transistors, then this is the build for you. The germanium transistor is a Tesla GC521 with 1.2mA leakage, which is typically way too much leakage, but it sounds perfect in this circuit.
View attachment 107761
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fuck yeah. this circuit rules. breadboarded it the other day and it blew me away.
 
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The Fornicus Overdrive. Had some trouble with the LED's, I think I might make a troubleshooting thread about it. The tl;dr is that according to this https://forum.pedalpcb.com/threads/fornicus-leds.20394/#post-274391 and also my limited knowledge from reading the schematic, you indeed want a difference in forward voltage for D1 and D2, and both my yellow and red LED's read pretty much spot on 2V on the TC1. Only the blue and UV LED's from Tayda seem to read differently, but they're 2,7V and 3V, and that's a really big gab to 2V. I think I went with some random other blue LED I had which was like 2.6V, but I'm wondering if the original is meant to be more of a "2V to 2.2V" difference or so, in which case maybe I should put an UV LED in D2 and a blue one in D1 or something like that. But like I said, might be a place for another thread.

D2 is also slightly lit up all of the time I think, but I don't notice issues in the sound.

It does sound pretty good like this, with Weight at light it's quite gnarly, but with Weight at heavy it's just a pure volume sag which I don't find very useful.

Here's also some behind-the-scenes pictures from taking the photo:
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Fama said:
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The Fornicus Overdrive. Had some trouble with the LED's, I think I might make a troubleshooting thread about it. The tl;dr is that according to this https://forum.pedalpcb.com/threads/fornicus-leds.20394/#post-274391 and also my limited knowledge from reading the schematic, you indeed want a difference in forward voltage for D1 and D2, and both my yellow and red LED's read pretty much spot on 2V on the TC1. Only the blue and UV LED's from Tayda seem to read differently, but they're 2,7V and 3V, and that's a really big gab to 2V. I think I went with some random other blue LED I had which was like 2.6V, but I'm wondering if the original is meant to be more of a "2V to 2.2V" difference or so, in which case maybe I should put an UV LED in D2 and a blue one in D1 or something like that. But like I said, might be a place for another thread.

D2 is also slightly lit up all of the time I think, but I don't notice issues in the sound.

It does sound pretty good like this, with Weight at light it's quite gnarly, but with Weight at heavy it's just a pure volume sag which I don't find very useful.

Here's also some behind-the-scenes pictures from taking the photo:
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Click to expand...
You’ve got quite the photoshoot director. Seems to have their “hands” on all the pictures you took.
 
These came in yesterday, about 2 weeks after ordering them.

This is my second set of Tone Hatch hum buckers. Really love his strat pickups too.

Adam's presentation is pretty killer considering the price point of his pickups.
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These are a new set of pickups not on his website yet. But I think he's going to be calling them "Vintage Class"
These are the same pickups that @Guardians of the analog had posted about and I think he's got these in all his main guitars now.

I have a set of his "BellKows" in my ES-335 and I would say that the BellKows are more traditional PAF where as the Vintage Class has a little more oomph despite the very close DCR and Inductance readings. I had him put A4's in both pickups for this set.

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I also had him make me a double cream, set but put a set of Raw Nickel covers on un-soldered, to keep him out of trouble with either Gibson or DiMarzio. :rolleyes:

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I decided to try the Double Cream look on my Gold Top. I was never really interested in the whole Double Cream thing until I started seeing Gibson's "Double Trouble" pickups in many LP Standards. I'm not 100% sold on how they look on a Gold Top but they sound pretty killer.

DCR is Neck-7.1, Bridge - 8.2 Pretty standard PAF readings. I was really surprised at how the bridge pickup really screams like it's a much hotter wind. The neck has got the clarity I'm always looking for in a PAF.

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I can't say enough good things about Adam Asmus and Tone Hatch pickups. The notion of needing to spend $400 (minimum) on a set of killer sounding PAF's is absolutely silly when options like Tone Hatch exist. And let me say that Tone Hatch is not "settling for cheap pickups". These can hang with the best of them. I think these would compare well with a set of Bare Knuckle A4 Mules.
 
MichaelW said:
These came in yesterday, about 2 weeks after ordering them.

This is my second set of Tone Hatch hum buckers. Really love his strat pickups too.

Adam's presentation is pretty killer considering the price point of his pickups.
Click to expand...

They look fantastic.

I may need to try a set. I have "parts" Bass VI that I am putting together, I wonder how his Seattle '93 Jag set would sound in it.
 
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